


Face Stars

by chronosaurus (kimnamjin)



Series: The Adventures of Lee Minho: Babysitter Extraordinaire [2]
Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Domestic, Best friends!JeongLix, Brotherly Affection, But also, Cute Kids, Domestic Fluff, Felix's older brother!Minho, Five year old!Jeongin, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Kid Fic, Short & Sweet, Sibling Love, Six year old!Felix, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, anyways stream back door!!!, baby jeonglix are so cute...they must be protected at all costs, babysitter!Minho, back on my kid!skz bullshit, featuring felix drawing freckles on innie, it's actually really cute i promise :'), kid antics, lee sibling fluff, literal kids!skz, minho is tiredt, my other kid skz fics got a good responses so i hope u all enjoy this too!, pop tarts as a plot device, so glad that's a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:26:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26500075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimnamjin/pseuds/chronosaurus
Summary: Minho darted a hand out and snatched the brown, felt-tip marker from Felix’s hand. It was still poisedrighton Jeongin’s cheek, and the jarring movement caused an awkward, somewhat-horizontal line to jut from one of the speckles drawn onto his skin.Felix pouted, and whined as Minho safely capped the marker. “Mimi hyung, Jeonginnie said he wanted face stars like me, so I was giving him some!”Minho furrowed his brows, now well-past the point of taken aback. He cocked his head at the pair of kids.“Face stars?”Jeongin, who had been watching the Lee brothers banter in relatively blank silence, piped up. “Felix’s face stars are so pretty, MinMin hyung. So I asked him to make me have face stars, like him.” He gestured at Felix’s pudgy cheeks; at the all-natural fanning of freckles on his skin.Or: Minho makes the mistake of leaving his little brother Felix, and his best friend Jeongin, alone while babysitting. He returns to find his baby brother peppering Jeongin’s face in spots of brown marker, in an attempt to give himface stars,like Felix’s.
Relationships: Lee Felix & Lee Minho | Lee Know, Lee Felix & Yang Jeongin | I.N
Series: The Adventures of Lee Minho: Babysitter Extraordinaire [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918921
Comments: 37
Kudos: 181





	Face Stars

Rule number one of babysitting? 

__

Don’t. Take. Your. Eyes. Off. The kids. 

__

_ Ever.  _ Even for a minute. 

__

Rule number two of babysitting? 

__

When faced with a pair of rambunctious boys begging you for post-kindergarten pop tarts, you  _ get them  _ those pop tarts, if you value your life. 

__

So when Minho is tasked with watching his six year old little brother Felix, and his horde of equally precocious kiddie cohorts, he sometimes needs to make compromises for the sake of his sanity. Pop tarts versus two or more wailing children craving sugar?  _ Always  _ succumb to the pop tart demands. 

__

Even if that means unashamedly breaking rule number one of babysitting. 

__

Today, Felix skipped into the living room with his best friend Jeongin in tow. His baby brother quickly unstrapped his velcro sneakers, before grabbing Jeongin by the wrist and forcefully pulling him into the play area. Jeongin barely had a chance to toe off his own pair of Doraemon light up trainers, before Felix got his pudgy hands on him.

__

Jeongin and Felix are nigh  _ inseparable,  _ to the point where Jeongin might as well be Minho’s second baby brother. To the point where he might as well be Felix’s  _ twin,  _ despite their one year age difference _.  _ He’s basically family, to the extreme where he's at the Lee house  _ just _ as much as the Yang residence. Maybe even  _ more.  _ Heck, the kid even leaves a toothbrush and folded set of pikachu-print pajamas in Felix’s drawers, a byproduct of the sheer number of impromptu sleepovers over the months. 

__

And where hyper five year old Yang Jeongin is involved, two things are certain. One: Pororo reruns  _ will _ be blasted on the family room tv, loud enough to shake their house to its foundation. The titular penguin character is currently bopping around on the flatscreen in fact, and Jeongin  _ just  _ entered the house with Felix. And two? Yang Jeongin will (politely, and adorably) demand s’mores flavored pop tarts at the earliest convenience. Because his mother is a notorious health nut, and refuses to indulge her son’s ravenous desire for processed sugar.

__

And Jeongin  _ quickly  _ learned, after coming home with him almost every day, that Felix’s older brother has a stash of the  _ good stuff.  _ And that Felix’s older brother is a horrible push over, when faced with two tots bearing sparkling puppy-dog eyes down on him. 

__

_ “MinMin hyungie, can I please have a pop ta’?”  _ Jeongin chirped, his stout little fingers latticed as he clasped his hands together. He looked up at Minho from his spot next to Felix on the floor, jutting out his lower lip and making it quiver. Despite being a child, Jeongin’s sharp, dark eyes always have an uncanny gleam of mischief to them. Oh, he  _ knew  _ what he was doing, alright. 

__

Felix gasped, from where he was sitting cross-legged on the child safe foam-mat unfurled on the living room’s hardwood floor. As if Jeongin just said the  _ magic words.  _ His socked feet wiggled in delight, making the kitty-print fabric distort and scrunch. “ _ Yeah!”  _ Minho’s little brother shrieked, _ “Can we please have some pop tarts, Mimi hyung?”  _

__

Minho was instantly a goner, as always. He can never say no to his baby brother or his friends,  _ especially  _ when Felix revs up his cuteness to the extreme by pouting his lips and pinching his little brows like that. They’re so  _ cute,  _ what  _ else  _ can Minho do except immediately bend to their will? 

__

There are probably  _ many  _ other alternatives than instantly giving in to their demands, actually, but Minho will elect to ignore them. For the sake of his sanity, once again. Rules of babysitting, Minho will tell himself. 

And so Minho sighed, good naturedly, as he always does post-acquiesce. He buried one hand in Jeongin’s shiny black mop and the other in Felix’s, and ruffled their hair in tandem. The two kids squealed in delight; both from the wild card of Minho's fingers in their hair, as much as because they  _ knew  _ what’s coming. Minho quipped,  _ “Fine, fine. I’ll be right back, boys.”  _

__

Minho knew all too well he’d be remiss to leave Felix and Jeongin unattended for any more than five minutes, but it can’t take more than a couple minutes to heat up some sugary toaster treats, right? What’s the worst that could happen? 

__

Plus, they were calmly coloring with a brand-spanking new set of markers Jeongin’s mother bought him when Minho left for the kitchen, anyways. Felix eagerly showed his best friend a crude portrait of Shin Chan, crooked and wonky and hardly discernible as the famous character. Jeongin clapped for Felix’s efforts nonetheless, before proudly showing off his own stick-figure drawing of Cardcaptor Sakura. Everything was peaceful, and wonderfully calm. Domesticity even sweeter than artificial s’mores. It was tranquil enough for Minho to deem it safe to leave the room for more than  _ 30 goddamn seconds _ . They’d be  _ fine  _ for a few minutes without Minho’s watchful gaze trained on them, he thought, confidently. 

__

Nothing bad could happen in a few inconspicuous minutes attending to the toaster oven, he thought, hopefully. Naively.  _ God,  _ what was he  _ thinking? _ This is  _ Felix  _ and  _ Jeongin  _ Minho is talking about here. One time Minho left the room for exactly four minutes to fix them some glasses of homemade lemonade, and when he returned the troublesome pair had  _ somehow  _ tracked in an entire forest floor’s worth of dirt and mud in from the backyard. They danced and frolicked about, bare-feet caked in sloppy soil, which soon spackled the floors and chairs and the legs of the dining room table. It took Minho  _ hours  _ of work on his hands and knees to buff out the grime from the carpet.

__

He’s been babysitting Felix and his impish friends  _ forever. _ He  _ knows  _ what they can get themselves into, at the drop of a hat. He knows the mischief they breed, unleashed at a moment’s notice. He just broke the cardinal rule of babysitting. 

__

He should’ve known better. 

__

Three minutes and 25 seconds after leaving the adjoining kitchen, Minho re-enters the living room, a plate of freshly warmed s’mores pop tarts in hand. The porcelain is pleasantly warm under his palm. The scent of sugar and marshmallow fluff wafts into the air, tantalizing enough to make  _ Minho  _ want to steal a bite. 

__

But what does Minho see, upon returning to the family room? 

__

Felix and Jeongin are still coloring, that’s for sure. The half-blank, half-technicolor pages of spare printer paper are still cluttering the floor; more disproportionate stick figures and pokemon and abstract critters penned onto the creamy surface. They’re still coloring, alright. 

__

But  _ not  _ in the way they were when Minho left them. Their art projects are long forgotten and crushed under Felix’s folded legs as he kneels before a cross-legged Jeongin, uncapped brown marker grasped between his little fingers. He has one stubby hand cradling Jeongin’s chin, to keep his friend’s head steady. His other hand is—

__

Oh no. 

__

Felix is coloring. On _Jeongin’s_ _cheeks._

__

Minho’s breath hitched in his throat at the sight, his blood running icy with dread. He unconsciously tightened his grip on the edge of the plate of pop tarts, simply out of his babysitter’s-sixth sense to keep the treats from falling to the floor. 

__

“Oh f–” Minho wheezed, before instinctually realizing the kids are  _ right there  _ and switching to a more...wholesome gear. “ _ –iddlesticks.” _

__

Felix’s eyes are squinted in concentration, as he draws on Jeongin’s cheeks. Although  _ drawing  _ might be a bit of a misnomer, Minho realizes, after a minute of standing in stunned silence. No, Felix isn’t drawing on Jeongin’s cheeks, he’s  _ dotting  _ on his cheeks. With each rise and fall of his chubby hand, Felix dots another auburn spot of marker onto the plump apples of the five year old’s face. 

__

Minho blinked, and with each unconscious close of his eyes he saw Jeongin’s mother bearing down on him in rage, when she arrives to pick up her son in a few hours. Jeongin's mom is strict enough to keep her kid away from _processed sugar—_ Minho _highly_ doubts she'd take kindly to _marker_ seeping into her poor son's _skin._ And during _Minho’s_ supposedly-trustworthy watch, no less! Reality crashed over Minho like a hurricane, and he jolted back into action. 

__

Rule number three of babysitting?

__

Know how to engage in  _ damage control.  _ And  _ fast.  _

__

He placed the pair of still-warm pop tarts onto the coffee table in the living room, before all but flying to Felix and Jeongin on the floor. The terry fabric of Minho’s sweats scratched at his knees and caught on the textured surface of the playmat, as he clumsily scrambled up to the boys. “Felix!” Minho squawked, horrified. 

__

“What are you  _ doing?!  _ Jeongin’s mom is gonna  _ kill me!”  _ Minho wailed, voice wobbling from a combination of severe exasperation, and gradually peaking fear of being imminently told off by a  _ very  _ disgruntled mother. Poor Jeongin’s cheeks are positively  _ covered  _ in a smattering of uneven, differently sized brown spots, and Minho is currently mentally writing out his will. He’ll be lucky if Ms.Yang lets Jeongin stay friends with Felix after this, let  _ alone  _ allow her son back into the Lee household! 

__

How did this happen?! How, in the split second interim Minho left the room, did Felix deem  _ Jeongin’s face  _ as his new canvas?! 

__

Minho will  _ never  _ understand children. He's stopped trying, officially. 

__

Without thinking, Minho darted a—small, but comparatively huge—hand out and snatched the brown, felt-tip marker from Felix’s own. It was still poised  _ right  _ on Jeongin’s cheek, and the jarring movement caused an awkward, somewhat-horizontal line to jut from one of the speckles drawn onto his skin. 

__

Felix pouted, and whined as Minho safely capped the marker; now kept out of his little grasp. “Mimi hyung, Jeonginnie said he wanted face stars like me, so I was giving him some!” 

__

Minho furrowed his brows, now well-past the point of taken aback. He relaxed back on his heels, and cocked his head at the pair of kids. He parroted, “ _ Face stars?”  _

__

Jeongin, who had been watching the Lee brothers banter in relatively blank silence, piped up. A small, slightly wistful smile pulled onto his lips, as he looked from Felix, to Minho, and then back again. Too wistful for a five year old, if you ask Minho. 

__

“Felix’s face stars are so pretty, MinMin hyung. So I asked him to make me have face stars, like him.” Explained Jeongin, pointing a tiny little finger at the brown marker kept safely out of Felix’s reach. He then gestured at Felix’s plump cheeks; at the all-natural fanning of freckles on his skin. 

__

_ Face stars,  _ Minho thought, as an electric jolt ran down his spine. 

__

“Jeongin, do you mean...Felix’s freckles?” He asked, softly. Minho scooted closer to the kids on the floor, and cupped Jeongin’s cheeks in his hands. Dots of marker are hidden under the length of his fingers, but just as many faux-sunspots are visible beneath his eyes and the slope of his cheek bones. A couple even pepper the bridge of his nose, upon closer inspection. Jeongin is staring up at Minho with those glittering eyes of his, and he did everything in his power not to smush his cheeks together and  _ coo _ . Minho unconsciously stroked his thumbs over Jeongin’s cheeks, and some of the fresh brown ink smeared across his skin. 

__

Jeongin nodded, looking up at Minho with big, sparkling eyes. He’s still got that little smile on his lips, but it looks tighter now. Almost strained. 

__

Minho sighed again, the exhale blowing some stray strands loose from Jeongin’s fringe. He retracted his hands from his cheeks, and Felix’s handiwork is left blurry and smudged in the wake of his palms. Some pigment from the undried marker is left imprinted on the pads of Minho’s fingers, to boot. But they’re still there, those mock-freckles. Those faux-face stars. 

__

Minho, babysitter extraordinaire, stole a glance at the pack of opened markers behind Felix; the plastic label reads  _ washable.  _ Minho’s tense muscles eased in relief, to the point where he allowed a crooked smile to tug onto his lips. These boys will be the death of him, he swears. 

__

But maybe he will be spared the wrath of Ms.Yang yet. 

__

Without another word, Minho bent forward and scooped Jeongin into his arms, and rose from the floor. The five year old squealed at being lifted so high off the air so suddenly, and threw his arms around Minho’s neck—as much as their tiny length permits. 

__

“You don’t need  _ face stars  _ like Lix, Jeongin. You’re  _ you,  _ and that’s good enough, isn’t it?” Mused Minho, tightening his grip on the wriggling child in his arms. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lixie?” 

__

Felix popped off the floor like a rocket, and ran to Minho’s side. He threw his arms around the dip behind his knees, burying his face into the terry of his joggers. He nuzzled his head into the fabric, before pulling away and answering. Mussed locks are left even more ruffled from static, sticking up like a crown on his sibling’s head. “Mhm! You don’t need face stars, Innie. You’re perfect the way you are.” 

__

Minho hummed in approval, and combed a loving hand through Felix’s wild hair, while the other keeps Jeongin safely held against his chest. For a six year old, Felix  _ sure  _ can be wise beyond his years, when he needs to be. He can be pretty damn  _ profound,  _ at that. When he isn’t drawing freckles on his best friend’s face, that is. 

__

Jeongin grinned, putting his dimples on full display. He smiled so wide, in fact, that some of Felix’s marker-freckles are completely hidden with the bunching of his cheeks. He snuggled closer to Minho’s neck, and said, “Thank you, MinMin hyungie. And you too, Lixie.” 

__

Felix beamed up at his best friend, but elected to keep his arms latched around his brother's legs. Jeongin grinned down at his best friend, but elected to stay safely cradled in the crook of Minho’s arm. 

__

With a heart exceedingly warmer than it was before, Minho got the kids back on track. Now that everything has been settled. “Well, let’s go on a field trip to the bathroom, boys. Felix, you’ll help me clean the marker off Jeongin’s cheeks, won’t you?” With the way Minho sent his little brother an incriminating glance, the suggestion  _ clearly  _ isn’t a question. 

__

Rather than attempting to argue, Felix instead peeled himself from Minho’s legs and  _ cheered.  _ “Yeah! Let’s go, Mimi hyung!” He whooped, bouncing on the balls of his socked feet and pumping two tiny fists.

__

Ah, if only  _ Minho  _ could be this excited about the proposition of subjecting two precocious kids to gobs of foamy, sweet-smelling soap. He'll be lucky if  _ he  _ can escape their trip to the washroom suds-free. He's not holding his breath, however. Oh, to be a child again, Minho thought. And it’s a  _ good  _ thing he’s wearing some knock-around clothes, cause he has a sneaking suspicion he’s about to get  _ soaked.  _ Maybe even be given a robust soap-beard, if he knows his brother. 

__

Jeongin giggled, and snuggled a marker-dotted cheek into Minho’s neck before speaking again. “Can we have our pop ta’ after, MinMin hyung?” 

__

Right, the pop tarts—Minho  _ completely _ forgot about the treats. They’re still sitting neat and pretty on the dining table, undoubtedly cooled and hardening on the plate. Oh well. Minho will  _ happily  _ plonk them back in the oven, for another round of toasting.

__

Minho chuckled, his chest full to bursting with affection for the pair of adorable kids. As adorable as they are mischievous, though. But they make Minho just as happy, as they make him exasperated. 

__

As the trio began to make their way to the bathroom, Minho said, “Sure, boys. After Jeongin gets clean, you can  _ finally  _ have your pop tarts.” 

__

The pair cheered in delight, and everything is right in the world once again. Minho’s heart is so warm. Even toastier than the pleasant heat of oven-warmed porcelain. 

__

Rule number four of babysitting? 

__

Lee Minho can  _ never  _ stay mad at those little devils. Even when he  _ probably  _ should. 

__

But no one’s keeping track of the times Minho lets those playful boys off the hook, when they should _ , probably _ , be put in time out. As long as the damage they deal is easily reversible with a pump of hand soap or a mop and bucket of cleaning solution, Minho sees no harm in their antics. 

__

They're kids, after all. Minho would rather let them experience childhood to its funnest and fullest, than enforce strict rules to save himself a few moments of stress. 

__

They're kids, and Minho intends to let them live as such. 

__

Rule number five of babysitting isn’t even a rule. 

__

All it states is that Minho loves his baby brother, and his pack of equally playful friends, with all his heart. Even when they eat the Lees out of pop tarts and give Minho mini-heart attacks without a care, he  _ loves  _ them. Because they make Felix, Minho’s  _ everything,  _ smile, and laugh, and cement life-long memories at such a tender age. 

__

And, as far as babysitter extraordinaire Lee Minho is concerned, that's  _ all  _ that matters. 

__

Even if he  _ will  _ be keeping any and all markers under watchful supervision, from here on out. 

**Author's Note:**

> i have some news everyone...jeonglix have been diagnosed with babie...and it’s Incurable 
> 
> I wasn’t planning on posting this fic now, but after felix uploaded all those adorable baby vids on insta, i thought now is as good a time as ever to post some kid!lix content!! Can u tell writing literal kids!skz is my fave thing in the world….
> 
> I really enjoyed writing this, so pls lmk if u want more lee bros content, bc i am So down to write more! Kudos really mean the world to me, and are super validating <3 
> 
> See u guys next weekend for a real spicie n different fic in honor of Seungmin’s bday!! I’m Very eager to post it, and it’s one of my fave things ive written recently so...i hope you’ll check it out!


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